Data centers are a common fixture in computing ecosystems, and especially in cloud computing. Data centers may have many commoditized resources such as processors, data storages, and even network links. The commoditized resources can fail or become overloaded. In that case, it is beneficial to have an agile system wherein resources can quickly be redistributed, and new resources can be brought online. To that end, a software-defined networking (SDN) architecture may be provisioned to provide a cloud backbone.
Software-defined networking (SDN) is an approach to computer networking that allows network administrators to manage network services through abstraction of higher-level functionality. This is done by decoupling the system that makes decisions about where traffic is sent (the control plane) from the underlying systems that forward traffic to the selected destination (the data plane). SDN may require a method for the control plane to communicate with the data plane.